The Codex Lacrimae

by A. J. Carlisle

  “What family name?” Perdieu asked, moving quickly forward, trying to see inside the frontispiece. “I was told you were orphaned at Mecina.”

  He halted next to Ríg, but the squire had already snapped the Codex shut and brought the book to Arcadian, who held it now closed in his lap.

  “We’ll get to such matters, later,” the Grand Master said curtly to Perdieu, “if ever.” He returned a frowning countenance to Ibn-Khaldun. “It’s hard to believe that a book from the East would have a western name inscribed in it. The trade routes are growing, but not that quickly. This tome looks ancient.”

  “I know, my friend, but the truth is there. Whatever the origin, Ríg, I’m afraid that the name inscribed there has traveled farther afield than any Christian’s ever traveled,” Ibn Khaldun shook his head sadly. “I was at the foot of the great Himalayas when I took possession of it.”

  Ibn-Khaldun turned to his apprentice.

  “Now, it’s my turn to apologize, Ríg. I fear that my mistake won’t be as easily undone as Marcus’s presence on the expeditio. I’ve brought this thing here because of the name inside of it, but, as I dreaded, you know nothing about it.” Ibn Khaldun looked regretfully at Arcadian. “For perhaps the first time in my life since Mecina, I was afraid of something, and I let that fear govern my decisions. I should take this thing into the desert and let it have its will with me.”

  “Let a book have its will... ?” Perdieu exclaimed. “Will no one listen? I demand —”

  “You demand nothing, at this moment,” Arcadian snapped. “I think that we’ll be having a full council after the news of this afternoon, but please let Ibn-Khaldun finish!”

  “There’s not much more to say, old friend. I’ve been pursued for the past half year, and perhaps personalized too much the extent to which those who have hunted me would go to retrieve the Codex. It became a game of hunter and hunted, and I see now that that’s exactly the place they wanted my mind to be.” He looked at Ríg. “I didn’t think that they could bring armies to their command.”

  “Wait a minute,” Perdieu roared incredulously, disregarding the grand master’s warning. He wouldn’t have his apprentice continually upstaging him, especially now considering this apparently new danger. “I’ve heard enough of the talk, understand less about all the politics, but I do see that book. Are you earnestly saying that this army from the East is coming for this book?” The Burgundian noble looked with sneering disbelief at his squire. “For Ríg?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Ibn-Khaldun replied, turning his attention to his student. “Upon reflection, I see now that I’ve led them right to you, Ríg. My hunters might’ve otherwise taken years to find you, but in running pell-mell here without thinking, I’ve led them to you with only six months of their time lost.”

  Chapter 12

  The Screaming Pillars of Raj al-Jared

  “That’s impossible,” Ríg said coldly, his anger breaking the silence that descended among those gathered in the chamber.

  He walked across the room and stood before the grand master and Ibn-Khaldun.

  “May I see it again, Father Arcadian?” Ríg murmured as he helped the elderly man heft the tome off his lap.

  “I demand to see it, too!” Perdieu exclaimed, advancing forward a step with a serious enough intent that Damian rose from his chair and interceded. “This is my squire — by law and custom, whatever comes to him must first be approved by me.”

  “Bernard, enough,” Arcadian said wearily. “If the book is Ríg’s, then it’s his.”

  “As far as I know, it’s not mine, Master Arcadian,” Ríg said as he looked again at the interior cover of the Codex Lacrimae. I don’t understand. My family’s background is mercantile — Sicilian. We’re at the opposite end of the world from the Himalayas.”

  He carried the book to the open window and held it up in the light to scan the interior cover and first pages more closely. He frowned. A mysterious sound arose from the tome, like an undercurrent of Gregorian chant heard from a distance, and colors started to flare in his mind.

  “Ríg?”

  “Oui, Master, je vais bien. I’m fine.”

  “Good. About that inscription,” Ibn-Khaldun said, “it’s not just the name, Ríg. Look more closely at the ink.”

  The youth stared for a moment at the frontispiece, and then fixed a hard gaze at his elder friend.

  “It’s calligraphied and a brownish-red...blood?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  Ríg touched the inscription and an arcane whispering began, this time, though, the strange sounds were accompanied by an onslaught of images that made the teenager almost stagger backwards.

  The life of a friend.

  At the whisper in his mind, Ríg recoiled and almost dropped the tome. Then flashes and images filled his sight.

  A shimmer of yellow, and he was in a forest, with sun streaming late-afternoon light upon a fast-flowing river — Ríg knelt to retrieve a leathern packet as a stunningly beautiful brown-haired woman ran to him. She was moving with a desperate speed and shouting for him to do something, panic widening her ovaline, sea-green eyes as she hurtled down a slope to prevent his touching the packet.

  A sparkle of white, and he suddenly stood shivering beside the same girl in a vast, marbled hall the color of bleached bone. The passage stretched for hundreds of cubits, lined with windows as high as oak trees, and so cold that the floor and walls were rimed with frost, causing the couple’s breath to float in grey vapors, and then Ríg felt the girl’s tanned hand slip into his own as a cloaked skeleton approached with outstretched, bony fingers.

  A flash of orange, and now he sat cross-legged before a fire in a campsite glade. The athletic beauty sat next to him, crouched beneath the same kind of fur cloak that seemed to weigh heavily on him. Across the blazing flames he saw two men speaking to him with unmistakable menace. Ríg glanced at the girl and she said something reassuring, a coy smile on her full lips.

  Beware the Norns who play dice with the fates of men; their comeliness is beguiling, but born of witchcraft and perilous.

  The words themselves sounded feminine, whispered in a melodious language on the periphery of Ríg’s knowledge, yet he still understood them. His perceptions returned to normal and he found himself back in Arcadian’s chambers.

  “What was that, Khajen? Did you say something about Norns? Or, witchcraft?”

  “I said nothing, but I don’t doubt that you’ve heard some words,” Ibn-Khaldun said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Nothing, for now.”

  “Khajen,” Ríg said softly as he closed the book, “tell us…tell me what this means.” He lowered the book to his side and tried to hold it casually. Ríg began to feel divided, part of his attention fixed on Ibn-Khaldun and the others, but his thoughts mostly on the visions and, particularly, the striking young girl featured in all of them.

  He focused past the distractions. “You can’t seriously expect us to believe that my family has anything to do with this, nor with the armies?”

  “My young friend, I’ve been carrying this cursed thing for half a year, wrestling with that very question.” Ibn-Khaldun replied.

  Then, the scholar’s gaze hardened and his tone became slightly reprimanding. “As for not believing the message, you’d do well to do so immediately, Stripling. I didn’t train your mind so that you’d refuse to entertain possibilities just because you don’t yet understand the nature of them.”

  “D’accord,” Ríg agreed quietly, but the words of his master vexed him. He refused to let Ibn-Khaldun’s interpretation of this strange book be the sole explanation. To do so would mean that Ríg himself (or a member of his family) was responsible for at least one of the armies massing outside the Krak des Chevaliers!

  Ríg returned the Codex Lacrimae to the table. The sensation of being in two worlds returned as he walked to the corner of the room where the Grand Master sat.

  In one reality he was making his w
ay across the flagstoned floor of the Krak and then, in a twinkle of grey light, he was on a steeply angled trail in the midst of a ferocious blizzard, hiking up a rocky stair whose granite steps were covered with snow drifts.

  The vision was a mountain path, and he was serving as rear guard to a company that included the vivacious brown-haired girl from the earlier wave of daydreams — for what else can these scenes be, he thought, but waking dreams? She now was clad in a hunter’s outfit that accentuated the sensual lines of her physique; he also noted that this time she had a dagger at her slim waist and held a quarterstaff as she ascended the snowy stairs. An enormous man loped up the mountainside in front of her. He wore a cloak of furs, had heavily bearded features and thick, shoulder-length hair. Indeed, in the flashing moment of supernatural sight, Ríg thought the man not to be a man at all, but a wolf. Beside him was a blond-haired woman who wore hunter’s togs, but she was shorter in stature than the familiar girl he was getting used to seeing. The huntress held a bow and had a quiver full of arrows strapped to her back.

  As he tried to understand the meaning of it all, the scene shifted to an underground cavern where four gigantic stone beings were attacking, each monster thrice the height of a man! The giants launched themselves at the group and the dream melted into something else, into another place and another time.

  He rubbed a couple fingers against his temple and furrowed his brows, trying to dispel this last image.

  In a flaring of crimson light, he found himself in a comfortable mountain chalet. A fire crackled high in the stone-faced hearth before him and Ríg saw himself lying on the floor next to the now mysteriously familiar girl, her head resting on his shoulder as he put his arm around her to go to sleep!

  Even though Ríg had felt an immediate attraction to the girl in the previous visions, lying under heavy fur coverlets in a cabin somewhere was the last place that the aspiring priest and scholar expected to be — he’d already taken preliminary vows of chastity and obedience to the Church in his training for Holy Orders, and this last scene completely ran counter to the direction of (and expectations about) the life he was trying to lead.

  Clarinda...her name is Clarinda, the voice in his mind informed him. Watch and ware, Hospitaller, watch and ware. Her aspect of Fate is the one most dangerous to men, binding into herself all that was, is, and will be. Call her Urd — she runs with Death and shows no fear…

  The image and voice evaporated as Ríg returned the Codex Lacrimae to the table.

  He gasped, looking swiftly around to see if anyone had noticed what he’d just experienced, his face aflame with embarrassment at the thought of being in any room alone with a girl, let alone about to fall asleep in front of a fire. No one noticed his discomfort.

  “So, in all your wisdom, Master Khaldun,” Perdieu was saying gruffly, no longer bothering to conceal his fury, “you decide to bring the book here, with an army at your heels?” Perdieu exclaimed gruffly. “Huh. Must be convenient to have a garrison where you can retreat when you run into trouble.”

  “To my knowledge, Brother Perdieu, the specific threat consists of two factors,” Ibn-Khaldun said, adopting the tone of a schoolteacher patiently explaining complex ideas to a classroom. “One of those factors is the book itself, and the other is the two men who’ve been pursuing me for the past six months. I know more about the Codex Lacrimae than I do the men, for I’ve discovered that its existence was known by the peoples east of Bangladesh long before I took possession of it.”

  He paused, but no one spoke. The men in the chamber waited for him to continue.

  “A little over a decade ago, a barbarian horde called the Az-guli came from beyond the Punjab in the East. They weren’t Mongols, but they may as well have been, so terrible was their ferocity in battle. It was said that the man who led them, Raj’ al-Jared, was building an empire, and determined to conquer all the lands westward to the Great Sea, or what your people call la Méditerranée.

  “Raj’ al-Jared’s army came in a wave across the Asiatic steppes, across Afghanistan, and finally arrived at the borders of Persia.” Ibn-Khaldun’s gaze had fixed on the Codex as he spoke, his voice subdued. “My people fled at his approach, for horrific tales of his conquests preceded him. Tales that spoke of some darkling force Raj’ al-Jared accidentally discovered while still a petty tribal chieftain in a Himalayan village.”

  “There have been barbarian incursions before,” Mercedier commented. “Europe has had its share as well.”

  “Let me finish,” the Muslim scholar replied. “This power that Raj’al-Jared discovered drove him to commit appalling atrocities. It was said that his own men would sometimes try to rebel at what he ordered them to do, but always his word would prevail, even if the members in his army screamed in resistance to his will.

  “That is one of the aspects that truly frightened my people: how terrifying must a power be that could drive ‘barbarians’ to despair of their own actions? So, initially we fled this man and his army, until we could flee no further. At the border of the Salt Desert in north-central Persia, the Dasht-e Kavir, my people made ready to do battle. Fortunately, something occurred during the evening before the encounter, and the army of my people greeted a dawn that cast its light on a landscape devoid of the enemy. The barbarians had fled, leaving behind only the mutilated body of Raj’al-Jared.”

  Ibn-Khaldun nodded at the troubled and confused expression of the Hospitallers around him.

  “You wonder if old Ibn-Khaldun has seen too much of the desert?” He pointed at the Codex Lacrimae, which rested on the oaken table. “That book was the ‘power’ that Raj’al-Jared found near his village at the foot of the Himalayas. For two years he kept possession of it, and on the eve of battle at Dasht-e Kavir, it was stolen by one of his sergeants, a man who desired to possess the work himself. But, the book eventually betrayed him, also.”

  Ibn-Khaldun looked steadily at Ríg, who’d again retrieved the tome from the table. He leafed through the yellowed parchment pages while his mentor spoke.

  “I’ll return to what I think of that in a moment, for it figures largely in what you intend to do with the book, Ríg.” He paused, and asked quietly of his young Hospitaller friend. “What do you think of the matter therein?”

  Ríg glanced at Perdieu before answering.

  “Of course, Ríg — you may respond.”

  “Je vous remercie, mon seigneur,” Ríg replied, glad that things were getting back to normal in the dual relationship he had with Perdieu and Ibn-Khaldun; it was in Ríg’s own interest to make sure that the paths he hoped for in life — those of warrior and scholar — remained clean and respectful of the hierarchies that each demanded, but the process of politicking was exhausting!

  “There seems to be a consistent text in the book,” Ríg commented, his voice adopting the tone he took when teaching novitiates in the scriptorium. “It’s interrupted frequently by odd sentence fragments that are clustered together in phrases, with curious symbols appended near each. Runes, I think.”

  Ríg handed the book to Damian and asked him to open it to any page. “Do you see?”

  “I cannot make sense of it,” Damian said, confusion in his voice.

  “Let me see,” Mercedier demanded from his bed. Upon looking at the open pages, he shook his head. “Hmph. Never seen its like. What language is it?”

  “Language?” Ríg asked, smiling at the two elder Hospitallers. “Brother Damian, Mercedier...it’s Latin.”

  “Let me see,” Arcadian urged from beside Mercedier. He leaned over the bed to peer at the pages.

  “It does, indeed, seem to be a collection of symbols or, as you say, ‘runes,’ Ríg.” He said after flipping through a few pages of the book. Ríg noted that the grand master took a moment to flip to the frontispiece. What he, Damian, and Mercedier saw there made them all raise their eyes to look at the youth, but they said nothing. Everyone in the room could tell that Perdieu, too, wanted to see the inscribed word, but Arcadian’s next question made t
he impulse moot.

  “What made you think that it’s Latin?” Arcadian asked.

  Ríg glanced at Ibn-Khaldun, then looked again at the book in Mercedier’s hands.

  “Ríg, I, too, see only runic script when I’ve glanced through that book.”

  The Hospitaller squire stared at him for a moment, then moved away from the group in obvious frustration.

  “Ah, it’s as I thought,” Ibn-Khaldun said. He inhaled deeply, as if steeling himself for an unpleasant task. “When you didn’t recognize the book a few minutes ago, I thought that I’d erred. But, this ability to read the script…it, indeed, seems to have been meant for you, Ríg. We must prepare for the siege, so I’ll hastily finish my story.

  “After conquering a city, Raj’al-Jared’s army gathered all the male captives — be they five years of age or sixty — and brought them to the front gates. There they’d be reviewed by this tribal-chieftain-turned-warlord. He always held a large black book at his side, and asked each of the captives if he could translate anything in it. No one ever could, and his rage at the end of the interrogations was always the same.

  “The soldiers would then construct two wooden, cylindrical towers that stood perhaps forty cubits in height, and he’d bind the captives to them. Depending on the size of the tower, fifteen to twenty men and boys were bound to each other by heavy straps at their biceps. Then another group of men and boys, equal in number to that of their fellows at the base, would he hoisted to stand atop the shoulders of their neighbors. So building, the tower of living men would rise slowly until it stood forty or fifty feet in height. Two days of steady labor would it take, the builders working in continuous shifts, filling the spaces between the bound men with mortar, or whatever material was at hand that could act as a fixing agent. All the while, the captives were given plenty of food and water, so as to make the upcoming torture and death last longer.

  “My people called Raj’al-Jared’s towers the ‘Screaming Pillars’, for when the work was completed, the monster would set fire to the conquered town, having enslaved or killed the women, but leaving their menfolk strapped to the columns as a terrifying, vocal reminder of his passage. Their screams continued to pierce the desert air long after the last of this madman’s army left the region.”